Dr Hau Hing Chau

Profile

Research interests

Dr Chau, before becoming an academic, was a mechanical designer at public listed companies. They were OEM manufacturers in Hong Kong producing leading consumer audio brands. He led a team of six mechanical engineers for four years and co-managed a 22-people engineering department. He had the overall responsibility in all aspects of the mechanical design of consumer audio products from initial ideas, concept development, detailed design to mass production. He took a keen involvement in the design and manufacture of complex freeform geometries via pioneering the use of CAD systems, and their connectivities to CAM systems and CNC machining.

His research interests lies in the design of products for brand conformance and differentiation, computational geometry for design and manufacture, shape synthesis, and inclusive design. In these areas he is currently researching the next generation of computer tools to assist the design of complex freeform geometry. The aim is to allow designers to manipulate geometries as they “see” them, as if using pencil and paper, without the hindrance by underlying representation of shapes on computer. He uses shape grammars to capture styles from existing corpora of design, and apply shape computation with shape emergence to generate new designs which conform to the given styles. He have published journal papers, book chapters and conference proceedings. He co-supervised three research postgraduate students who had since gained their PhDs.

He teaches product design in a design studio setting. He gave instructions to a computer aided industrial design software Alias and a computer aid manufacture CNC machining software NX. He currently leads the teaching of a computer aided design software SolidWorks for 3D solid modelling, 2D draughting and advanced 3D surface modelling. He also supervises student projects at undergraduate and MSc levels.

Qualifications

• BEng (Hons), Leeds, 1996
• PhD, Leeds, 2002

Research groups and institutes

• Institute of Design, Robotics and Manufacturing
• Design sciences